Catalogue essay by Sacha Llewellyn

During her six-decade career, Marion Adnams forged a reputation as a painter of deeply distinctive and dream-like visions inspired by the Surrealist movement. Fascinated by stones, shells and other objects found in the countryside, she created disturbing juxtapositions to produce meditations on life and death. In 1964, during a walk in the Vaucluse, France, Adnams became captivated by a beautiful stone filled with holes: ‘The big stone had a personality. It stood silhouetted against the sky, silent and inscrutable, its many holes and cavities like un-seeing eyes. It was calm and dignified and yet at the same time there was something faintly disturbing about it’. Describing it as ‘a piece of modern sculpture’, Adnams posited, ‘Nature thought of the idea before Henry Moore!’. In her unpublished autobiography, The Enchanted Country, Adnams described how she set about creating this painting – A Candle of Understanding in Thine Heart – whose title is taken from the extra-canonical works of Estras. Setting the stone against a beautiful sky, ‘intense blue, changing to gold as it neared the horizon…a sunset calm’, she then juxtaposed it with nine snails – symbols of wisdom, persistence and harmony – with a tiny flame burning in each so that they became little lamps. ‘I cannot explain why I saw the shells as lamps, but I was quite certain about it’, Adnams explained. However, three years later, when she returned to France and visited the little museum at Apt, the reason behind her use of snail-lamps became crystal clear to her: ‘I saw there, for the first time, a collection of Roman votive lamps, made of clay, and found frequently on the hills near here. In shape and size, they resembled exactly my snail-shell lamps’.